"Dibdin, Michael - Aurelio Zen 02 - Vendetta UC - part 08" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dibdin Michael)

by public transport.
Zen's style behind the wheel was similar to that of an
elderly peasant farmer phut-phutting along at zo kph in a
clapped-out Fiat truck with bald tyres and no acceleration,
blithely oblivious to the hooting, light-flashing hysteria
building up in his wake. The drive from Rome to the port
at Civitavecchia had been a two-and-a-half-hour ordeal,
but getting off the ferry presented even greater problems
of clutch control and touch-steering than had the innumer-
able traffic lights of the Via Aurelia, at each of which the
Mercedes had seemed to take fright like a horse at a fence.
Having stalled three times and then nearly rammed the
side of the ship by over-revving, Zen finally managed to
negotiate the metal ramp leading to Sardinian soil, or
rather the stone jetty to which the ferry was moored.
Rather to his surprise, there were no formalities, no
passports, no customs. But bureaucratically, of course, he
was still in Italy.
It was Zen's first visit to the island. In Italy all police
officials have to do a stint in one of the three 'problem
areas' of the country, but Zen had chosen the Alto Adige
rather than Sicily or Sardinia, because from there he could
easily get back to Venice to see his mother.
The port amounted to no more than a couple of wharves
where the ferries to and from the mainland touched once a
week and Russian freighters periodically unloaded cargoes
of timber pulp for the local papermill. At the end of the
quay a narrow, badly-surfaced road curved away between
outcrops of jagged pink rock. Zen drove through a
straggling collection of makeshift houses that never quite
became a village and along the spit of land projecting out
to the harbour from the main coastline. The sun was still
hidden behind the mountains, but the sky overhead was
clear, a delicate, pale wintry blue. Seagulls swept back and
forth foraging for food, their cries pealing out in the crisp
air.
As he drove through the small town where the road
inland crossed the main coastal highway, Zen's instinct
was to stop the car, drop into a cafe and start picking up
the clues, sniffing the air, getting his bearings. But he
couldn't, for in Sardinia he was not Aurelio Zen but Reto
Gurtner, and although he had as yet only a vague idea of
Gurtner's character, he was sure that pausing to soak up
the atmosphere formed no part of it. Or rather, he was
sure that that was what the locals would assume, and it
was their view of things that mattered. A rich Swiss stop-
ping his Mercedes outside some rural dive for an early-
morning cappuccino would instantly become a suspect
Swiss, and that of all things was the one Zen could least
afford. He must not let the clear sky, pure air and early-